And an overdue summary, at that! My original question involved
my search for a laptop that would run Linux and that had the control
key where nature intended it to be: to the left of the "a" key.
My thanks to Irving Wolfe, Steve Rader, Adam Crews, Jont Allen,
and Jon Earle who all responded with helpful info (and several
of whom share my affliction: fingers trained to reach for Control-H!).
One solution is to use xmodmap (which comes with X) to remap
the keys. Roughly speaking, xmodmap is capable of translating
a physical key to a virtual key. (In other words: if you want
the "m" key on your keyboard to send "q", xmodmap will let you
do that. So it works for this as well.) You can stash your
favorite remappings in ~/.xmodmaprc, have xmodmap read them
on startup and off you go. In fact, Steve supplied the
contents to do the caps-lock->control trick:
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
remove Control = Control_L
keysym Control_L = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L
add Lock = Caps_Lock
add Control = Control_L
Jon mentioned that the Toshiba line of laptops actually has
the control key in the right place to being with.
Another possible avenue would be to check out Linux system retailers
like VA Research (www.varesearch.com) because...well, because they
probably field this question as often as anyone. (I haven't taken
this route yet: too distracted doing a zillion other things.)
Cheers,
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
